Bikini Kill - (self-titled) LP

The descriptively titled debut full-length by riot grrrl pioneers Bikini Kill combines their first and purest (as opposed to best, although there's an argument to be made there as well) releases, 1991's Bikini Kill and their half of the 1992 split EP Yeah Yeah Yeah, done with the U.K.'s Huggy Bear. Bikini Kill's two most famous songs, ''Suck My Left One'' (a deeply disturbing incest fantasy in which Kathleen Hanna keeps shifting viewpoints so quickly, from rage to horror to a kind of mocking, in-your-face titillation, that the listener is left vertiginous by the end) and ''Thurston Hearts the Who'' (a sort of American post-punk version of the Gang of Four's ''Anthrax''), are both present and accounted for, along with 11 others that range from willful noise primitivism to genuinely rocking scene anthems like ''Rebel Girl.'' This and the even noisier follow-up, Pussy Whipped, might be all the Bikini Kill one needs. --All Music Guide
As usual when a punk band does the trick, the secret isn't just magic. It's ideas, like the way Kathleen Hanna slips into the cockney ''roights'' on ''Double Dare Ya,'' or the weary ''Fine fine Fine fine Fine fine Fine fine'' that ends ''Suck My Left One,'' which I'd say is about learning to make something of sexual victimization and then learning that it's still no fun, but I could be wrong, which is why we need this band even if we don't believe racism and eating meat are, and I quote, ''the same thing.'' Poly Styrene discovers ideology. Ideology discovers Poly Styrene. --Robert Christgau